Moving Parts Page 7

  At this point the narrator could give an assurance that he wouldn’t have stolen a bottle from the house with the garden if he had not unwittingly gotten stuck in the ruts of other tales. It may be that all three men on the platform – each in his own way – would be glad to carry out a task that exhausts the narrator and fills him with aversion; furthermore, they do not receive one zloty for their pains. They do not have personal expenses; they don’t pay for hotels or dinners; their stories are cheap. Despite this the sight of money must have nettled the two of them who got nothing. They toss scathing gibes aimed at the third, who is just disappearing with his retinue at the end of the platform: Rumor has it that somewhere or other he made a thorough mess of a job and now he’s penniless and is given no more work. They recall the two unnecessary corpses from when a hotel door was destroyed; and they imagine the fury of his employer, who gave him his marching orders on the spot. In the meantime, a train is approaching the platform with a rumble; it’s covered with bright zigzags of graffiti – assuredly the work of Braun and Schmidt, the elusive vandals, transparent as air. The hobo and the senile old professor enter a car along with the narrator, holding him by the elbows in case he should suddenly decide to abandon the trip. The train sets off; the response to the question of why it isn’t moving in the opposite direction should be that this direction and the opposite one are of equal worth, and so it’s all the same. Here then is the interior of the car; on the floor is a sticky patch gathering dirt, and there are only two people sitting on the ripped-up seats. One of them is a young woman wearing provocative makeup. From her handbag she has taken a small mirror that reflects the highlights in her dyed red hair. Pursing her lips, she studies the outline of her flashy lipstick. Nearby sits a sullen youth with a shaved head, in a black T-shirt and camouflage pants with dangling suspenders. His grandfather stomped the rhythm of a military march in heavy boots, as an exemplary German soldier in dark green uniform. His father, for instance a locksmith, slaved his whole life from dawn till dusk. Three beers will always console: Such was his adage. He had a heavy hand. The boot and the hand will lend both men the appropriate weight. The grandfather and the father appear here as ballast; they have been brought in primarily so that the character with the dangling suspenders remains on solid ground. But aren’t the face and silhouette taken directly from Feuchtmeier? The theft of a bottle of liquor is nothing compared to such an abuse. The youth does not know this. He did not pick this body for himself; it was assigned to him. He is younger than Feuchtmeier and younger than his redheaded traveling companion; he is probably called Schmidt or Braun, whatever. His wrists and forearms all the way up to the elbow are covered in deep scars; it could be wagered that many times he has grown sick of life. But not completely, since in the end he lacked sufficient desperation. It’s not clear whether this couple got on the train together and if they have anything in common. It’s possible that they only just met, and that they’re already working out how to part on any pretext. He’s toying with a dark metal object of familiar shape; the magazine keeps popping out with a snap. So there’s a gun, whether the narrator likes it or not; this fact may have its consequences. The owner of the gun slowly raises his eyes. For a moment he stares at the red dressing gown, perhaps asking himself the inexorable question of why such people live and why they are tolerated. He’s already stood up from his seat at the end of the car; he’s approaching at an unhurried pace, swaying as the train rocks on the rails. Time to get off, bum – such words would not shock anyone now; they could be guessed at if only from the movement of his lips, when nothing can be heard over the clatter of the wheels. It’s well known that red provokes. The oxidized barrel, jabbing the old man’s ear, shows him which way to go. The latter would get off right away if it weren’t for the fact that the train is hurtling along and the doors are locked, and so he just blinks repeatedly and tries to say something; it can be seen that he is missing several front teeth. He completely agrees with the owner of the gun; lisping slightly, he acknowledges that everywhere you go there’s too much trash like himself, an old fogy in a red dressing gown. Reaching the end of the sentence, he swallows hard. The owner of the gun looks about with the glazed eyes of a madman. He moves slowly, and equally slowly considers what to do with the old man before the train arrives at the next stop. Now the hobo will interject his own comment. Ain’t that a thing, he snickers, the mad have gone mad. They’ve joined those who’d finish off the mad right at the outset. Finish off all the maniacs, the psychopaths, the transvestites and, it goes without saying, idiots like Schmidt and Braun, too. They’d crush them beneath the soles of their hobnailed boots. The mad’d bear the brunt of it since Jews are harder to come by. And homeless winos’d be let off the hook in the end. Winos can never be eradicated. The barrel turns unhurriedly toward the hobo; the owner of the gun must want to make sure his ears are not deceiving him, especially since the clatter of the wheels muffles speech. The hobo himself didn’t properly hear what he said a moment ago, so he’s unable to repeat it. If that’s the case, he’ll have to crawl under the seat and bark when he’s told to: woof woof! But the reedy falsetto he produces from his dry throat is not enough; the owner of the gun won’t let up until he hears a prolonged yelping of the kind he knows well. It goes without saying that he’ll get everything he demands. The ease with which a person can insist on his own way in the railroad car can only inspire disgust, and so at this moment Schmidt or Braun has had enough; he’d like to put an end to this pathetic spectacle as soon as possible. But he knows no other way than to take aim and pull the trigger. There is a deafening bang; all the witnesses of the scene close their eyes, and for a moment all they can hear is a buzzing in their ears. Then, when the moment passes and the clatter of the wheels returns, everyone realizes that the gun is just a starting pistol. Now they laugh, they laugh fit to burst, including the pretty woman in the provocative makeup, and the scruffy old man who could have died from fright and at this moment is still clutching his heart. The hobo emerges from under the seat, his clothes gray with dust, and rakes cigarette butts out of his hair. His mouth, set in a foolish grin, does not utter a single word of complaint.

  In the meantime the train is moving further and further away from the point of departure, to which the narrator will have to return while he still remembers how many stops he has to go back – for the moment only one. It may be enough to cross to the opposite platform when the time comes. Unfortunately they, too, wish to get out, the hobo with the earring and the old man in the red dressing gown. The narrator walks at a brisk pace; his shoes get wet in puddles. In his haste he splashes through mud, determined to lose the other two – the tramp with the earring dogging his footsteps, and the out-of-breath professor, who every so often catches up at a trot. It may be that in his pocket the hobo carries his own bunch of keys from all the cellars he knows and all his favorite heating vents; and that he is sticking to his own route. He probably uses the gift of omniscience to find the best morsels in garbage dumps. The scruffy old man, on the other hand, undoubtedly appears as an episodic character in both stories whose plots have become entangled. Here then is a run-down neighborhood situated goodness knows how far below the level of the hotel foyer, that indifferent paradise in which the body scarcely suffers at all and has no need of sympathy, and another few floors below the beautiful gardens of summer, where structures built of expectations and imaginings come crashing down. Here is a bar on the corner, the scene of the action of unknown stories that are just as good or as bad as any others. A battered signboard bears letters in a familiar angular script. Inside there is a hum of voices; the television is on, and the local unemployed are watching a soccer game. There is a sudden hubbub in the bar: goal! A few fans spill out onto the street; one of them gives a yodeling cry and waves a betting slip. The narrator will not hesitate for long; he’ll enter the bar and mingle with the crowd. It’s three to nothing. All around, people are making a racket and clinking mugs. He stands at the counter, but the other two are right by
him already, and he has to order beers for them as well. He’d most like to slip away before they finish their drinks. But they guzzle their beer quickly, glancing at the TV screen out of the corner of their eye, very pleased with themselves. They may well be aware that they would have been ejected even from this bar had they not previously attached themselves to the narrator.

  The only league the narrator knows is full of Polish diacritics alien to the Gothic script of the signboard. They throng the screen like the Polish zlotys in the European banks and the ports of the Far East; they flutter on the stands, appear on the illuminated scoreboard, and time and again flash between the legs of the players in motion. They run rampant, unseen, in the mass singing on the stands. Where are you off to, the two of them, the hobo and the professor in the red dressing gown, ask anxiously. To the toilet. The bartender points the way. The narrator opens his wallet, but the hobo takes it out of his hands. He will pay when the time comes; in the meantime he orders another round. The narrator acquiesces without a murmur, remembering the payment promised by telephone for the afternoon. In the toilet there is no window. A determined search for a way out through the back rooms pays off. But the dark hallway, extremely long, takes him alarmingly far from the railroad station. Goodness knows where it leads. At its end is a locked door; none of the keys fits the rusty lock. The only way out seems to be a trapdoor in the floor. The narrator hesitantly lifts the flap and peers inside, holding up his cigarette lighter. He thinks he can make out cast-iron rungs suspended over a void. At this exact moment something soft touches his shoulder. He freezes; the lighter falls from his hand into the hole, though it isn’t heard to land. It’s only the hobo who was mistreated by Schmidt or Braun; he still reeks of the dumpster. Him again. No witnesses are present, and the narrator pushes him against the door; there is a crash. Most of all he’d like to grab him by the scruff of the neck and toss him like a sack of rags back down to the other end of the dark hallway; he takes hold of the army jacket and shakes the hobo fiercely, as if he wished to snap the threads of the stories that have accidentally become intertwined, but his clenched fist ends up clutching nothing but an empty sleeve. Could he have seized the other man by the throat? Yes, he is capable of that. And since he’s capable of it, why should he not recover his wallet? The hobo doesn’t have his wallet; in the space of a few moments he’s managed to lose it, though he swears hoarsely that he’s merely given it to the old man in the dressing gown for safekeeping. His eyes are popping out. Released from the iron grip, for the longest time he stands gasping. In his view the wallet would in any case be of no use to the narrator in the place he was looking at through the opening. Old Polish zlotys from before the devaluation of ’95! Even jokes have their limits. He personally advises strongly against the trapdoor; it’s not a good way out. What the hobo with the earring resents is not the torn-off sleeve, but the fundamental disloyalty toward others in the same boat; in a word, my friend – arrogance. He knows no greater sin than arrogance. He’s really sorry about the lost lighter; he tries now to give the narrator his own, a disposable one of cheap plastic. He tries to thrust it into his hand, then into his pocket. The refusal of this gift truly saddens him, but he doesn’t insist and gives up the struggle. He attempts to draw the narrator back to the bar to finish the mug of beer he left on the counter, and to face up to the events that are to come. Knowing everything but admitted nowhere, he’d be happy to enter into partnership with someone who is let in everywhere. What’s that – he’ll have to go back to the bar without him? He shakes his head; for certain reasons this is impossible. And in fact he does not go back. Slipping through the trapdoor, the narrator hears above his head the rasping sound of an undoubtedly rusty key in a stiff lock and the creak of a door being opened. He prefers to wait for a moment, hidden beneath the flap, in the empty space between two floors, clinging to the cast-iron rungs. It looks as though he has succeeded in getting rid of the hobo. Since things went so well, he wants to go back at once.

  He lifts the flap. But now he sees rooftops, smoke coming from chimneys, walls of houses covered in black soot in the desolation of a sweltering summer. He cannot believe his eyes. Determined to return quickly through the bar to the train station, he crawls out onto the steep tin roof. He gazes around in confusion, not knowing himself what he is looking for. At the foot of the apartment building – seen from above – stands a coal cart. The Percheron that is hitched to it lifts its tail and drops brown lumps of manure onto the cobbled roadway. The day is just as hot as in the garden situated several floors higher, though the air is even more oppressive. The heated tin burns. Seeking to escape the swelter, the narrator finds himself in an attic filled with bed linen drying on clotheslines. His lighter is nowhere to be found; it’s vanished. The wet white sheets seem to be steaming beneath the roof. The pillowcases exude the heady, fleeting innocence of lace. In the corner of each piece of bedding is an embroidered monogram in the form of a large F. From the attic it’s possible to get out onto the staircase. From behind a half-open door on which a business card has been pinned in lieu of a nameplate, there comes the sound of a trumpet, like a golden thread uncoiling in leisurely fashion from a skein; in the space of a few bars it stretches from floor to floor. The thread must be strong, for on it hangs the fate of the unseen trumpeter, which depends on future contracts; he undoubtedly plays swing in nightclubs. The trumpeter has a short, simple name – let’s say, without even looking at the business card: John Maybe. Nightclubs don’t need excessive talent and are not prepared to pay for it; they’re content when there is a trumpet in the band and it’s played in tune; and if the owner himself sits at a table for no other purpose than to listen to the trumpet solos, he keeps this to himself. In such a way John Maybe will never get the recognition he deserves.

  Lower down, the doorways to the apartments are more imposing: two on each floor, with veneered double doors, handles that inspire respect, and gleaming brass nameplates on which the names of the residents are engraved with great care, once and for all, as if the idea of moving had never occurred to anyone here. From the nameplate it can be learned who the bed linen drying in the attic belongs to. It is the Fojchtmajers’. Sooner or later this name had to reappear in some sentence; all this time it was waiting patiently for its turn. Was the Polish Word publishing house and printing press not mentioned earlier? Its additional specialty could for example have been theatrical posters and programs. It goes without saying that these Fojchtmajers are not and do not wish to be connected in any way with the immaculately uniformed Captain Feuchtmeier of the navy of the Third Reich, also mentioned above, commander of a gunboat sailing the southern coast of the Baltic. The captain would resent the spelling of their name. But the Fojchtmajers’ name has grown accustomed to its spelling, and it should be believed that the spelling too has grown used to its sound. If the names of the captain and the publisher are juxtaposed here, the reason lies exclusively in the sequence of sentences. So the two names stand opposite one another; the initial F of the one stares at the final r of the other and vice versa, and together they impose on the story a somewhat problematic bipartite symmetry. And neither of them sounds Polish. And each is equally lengthy, and even slightly pleated, like a lowered curtain. Behind one of the curtains a gunboat of the Kriegsmarine pitches in the fog; behind the other is a throng of civilians, perhaps even Jews, half-transparent, with absent expressions. And why them in particular? This question, asked in a firm tone and requiring a response, relates to certain obligations imposed on the content by the two-part symmetry. The images should, for example, remain in equilibrium on both sides of unseen scales, thanks to their obviousness, which would be confirmed by statistics. This principle alas will not be upheld. The narrator does not consider it his responsibility. Evidently this crowd of extras was also in place and fate happened to pick them. Where did they come from? From nowhere. They are at home: They were encamped behind the curtain, in the hallways along which dismantled pieces of scenery are removed for storage after the fi
nal performance— the sheets of plywood with the backdrops of various landscapes and interiors in one place, the braces of untreated wood elsewhere. It’s possible that from the very beginning they were somewhere between the lines. At most it might be asked why they remain stubbornly attached to their hooked noses and their sadness. This rhetorical question requires no reply, and doesn’t leave the slightest space for it; but a reply forces itself uninvited into the very middle of the paragraph. It declares that they were given no choice. Existing as a semitransparent crowd and deprived of their own power to be one thing or another, in everything they have to fall in line with the words of the description. They are obliged to make do with the adjectives imposed upon them and, whether they like it or not, fill them with their own existence, as they fill the cars of freight trains that are terrifying to get into, but which it so happens they have to enter. Otherwise it will immediately transpire that their own existence is no longer possible.